Quote: "STEEM is about the best emulator you can get for Atari Machines. The sound in STEEM is a bit weird, I certainly remember my Atari sounding better, and my STE sounding a helluva lot better, really the STE had the same quality sound chip as the Amiga, it just arrived too late and wasn't the standard so few games made use of the extra features.
"
Yeah apparently it's almost identical. The STE seems like the logical (dare i say it) catch up machine. With the new sound chip, blitter, hard scroll registers, more memory etc. But the update barely bring it the older 1984 OCS chipset. It's strange they didn't improve the number of bit planes.
Quote: "You guys all know LGD right? (atari.st) - there's a monthly or bi-monthly Atari magazine that you can read online, it should have some clues as to what happend. I remember using a Falcon shortly after they were released, compared to the PC's available there was simply no contest (Atari's OS was largely inspired by the Mac's, they actually got permission to use ideas from it) - Atari should have had it in the bag."
Well there's something that does appear to be missing for that occur though, (or at least, i haven't seen it clearly mentioned) and that's an apparent lack of pre-emptive multi tasking in TOS ?.
http://members.aol.com/liamproven/reference/tos_hist.htm
So do early editions don't have multi tasking ?. As according to that site (and god knows if it's accurate - prolly not) it didn't appear until pretty late in the proceedings ?. In terms of productivity machines, that seems like fairly decent detractor.
Quote: "IIRC the Amiga had the USA covered, with C='s deserved popularity in the US because of the C64, the Amiga was the natural progression for most people, there was too much faffing about with the 8-bit Atari's IMO, the 8-bit market was sealed up, Atari should have got developing quicker, and sealed the Tetris deal (instead Nintendo waited till they were ready to ship and told them to pack it in)."
Well in terms of the progression fro C= to A500 basically. C= did just as good a job as clouding the market with options as what Atari seemed to do. It's like they were throwing darts and waiting for something to stick. In those few short years in the middle/late 80's they tried it all. The C128, SD64, MSX machine's, and apparently even C64 console.. You name it, they seemed to have a crack..
I Dunno about the US, But I think, like Atari, it was their white whale. It was certainly a good region for desk top productivity machines. Video/Multimedia stuff. NewTek's toaster, Opal vision, Scalar, LightWave all that stuff.
I'd imagine one key issue with gaming on the Amiga in the US, would have been the different video heights between NTSC and PAL. Later revisions of the chip sets could output a squashed image for NTSC users of PAL height and vice versa (ECS/AGA chip sets) But somehow having the bottom of your nice new PAL game hanging off the bottom of your screen doesn't seem like a plus to me i that region.
